Senator Richard Lugar accuses Tea Party of trying to ‘cleanse’ Republicans

“He [Mr Mourdock] has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission
is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they
see it,” he said, “This is not conducive to problem solving and
governance.” “Worse, he will help delay solutions that are totally
beyond the capacity of partisan majorities to achieve. The most
consequential of these is stabilizing and reversing the Federal debt in an
era when millions of baby boomers are retiring.”

Barack Obama, who has often decried the partisan deadlock in Congress that he
blames for his failure to achieve many of his own policy goals, issued a
pointed statement praising Mr Lugar as an opponent who was “often
willing to reach across the aisle and get things done”.

Celebrating their victory, Mr Lugar’s jubilant opponents accused him of being
a sore loser and failing to keep touch with the demands of the Party
grassroots after it emerged that the Indiana Senator had not owned a house
in the “hoosier” state since 1977.

“The message to the establishment is, ‘You’re our servants. We’re the
masters. Do what you’re supposed to do, adhere to the Constitution or we’ll
fire you.'” wrote a triumphant Greg Fettig, a founder of the ‘Hoosier
Patriots’ tea party group, on Twitter.

The defeat of Mr Lugar, who read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at
Pembroke College, Oxford, came as conservative forces scored another notable
victory when voters in North Carolina passed an amendment to the state
constitution that reinforced a ban on gay marriage, stripping legal rights
from civil unions.

“I think it sends a message to the rest of the country that marriage is
between one man and one woman,” said Tami Fitzgerald, the head of a
local campaign group that successfully lobbied for the amendment, “The
whole point is simply that you don’t rewrite the nature of God’s design
based on the demands of a group of adults.”

The vote in North Carolina – where the Democrats will hold their pre-election
Convention this autumn – comes as President Obama is under increasing
pressure from liberals in his own party to publicly back gay marriage; a
move he has so far resisted.

As the conservative votes in Indian and North Carolina drew headlines, Mitt
Romney, the presumptive Republican party nominee president who has his own
problems convincing the party grassroots he is a true conservative, won
three primary votes.

Mr Romney is now running unopposed except for the libertarian Republican Ron
Paul, and won primaries in Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia,
bringing his total of delegates to 919 delegates, still 225 shy of the 1,144
needed to formally close out the nomination.

Analysts said Mr Romney could be disappointed with his own showing, after
failing win 70 per cent of the votes in any of the three states, however in
a sign of growing grassroots disgruntlement on both sides of the political
spectrum, Mr Obama suffered an embarrassment of his own.

It came as a Texan convict, Keith Judd, managed to win some 40 per cent of the
votes in a Democratic primary in West Virginia after taking advantage of a
local rule that enabled him to pay $2,500 dollars to get on the state
ballot.

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